Thursday, October 27, 2005

Bereshit (Torah)

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The White Space before the Black Letters, or The Mysterium Tremendum of Creation

One year on Shabbat Bereshit, approaching the Torah scroll just before the reading, I observed the expanse of white parchment preceding the first word. I commented to my neighbor at the bimah that the white parchment may be seen as representing the endless mystery of what there was, even before the “in the beginning” described in Genesis.

As we once again read the story of the Creation, we ponder anew the ineffable mystery of Being itself. We speak of the grandeur that is the cosmos as being created ex nihilo, from nothing; but in fact, there was never truly nothing, for God was there “before any thing was created.” Where and what was God before there was even a world? Genesis 1:2 speaks of tohu vavohu, the deep darkness, the great void, a world of chaos, water. Even the Kabbalah, that Jewish teaching which delves most into the secrets of the cosmos, focuses primarily upon the lower seven sefirot, representing the means by which God emanates and suffuses His Presence into the world as we know it. The highest sefirot—Keter, the Divine Crown, and beyond that Ein Sof, “He who is without limit”; the realm of El Mistater, Deus Absconditus, the hidden aspect of God, sequestered in the hidden recesses of being—is only spoken of by allusion. It is utter mystery, beyond human speculation.

In recent years, some religious scientists have tried to delve into the mysteries of Creation, with an approach synthesizing modern science and Torah. Physicist Gerald Schroeder of Bar Ilan University has written two significant books, The Science of God and Genesis and the Big Bang, in which he attempts to interpret much of the scientific data in terms of the Torah, using some unexpected keys that he has worked out. Some of the arguments for an intelligent Creator guiding the physical processes of Creation are very powerful and impressive (the wild improbability of the origin of matter itself; the fortuitous preponderance of carbon in the universe, essential for organic life; the precise gravitational balance of our earth, enabling the existence of life, etc.). Others (particularly his attempt to to maintain the literal idea of Six Days of Creation by using complex mathematical calculations to reinterpret the term “day” relative to the relationship between the thermal heat at the time of the Big Bang and the present mean temperature of the universe), are more questionable. He also finds fascinating parallels between the theory of the Big Bang and the descriptions of the creation found in the Zohar and in Ramban's Torah commentary.

For myself, I find a greater fascination in Bereshit in the accounts of the beginning of humanity, and in the fundamental datum of our own existence in this world, conveyed through the seemingly artless, naive stories of Adam and Eve and the Garden. One finds there all the basic elements of human life as we know it: work, sexuality, violence, hatred, intellectual curiosity, consciousness of shame, etc.

Ramblings on a Theology of Sexuality: Lust and Intimacy

Reading Parshat Bereshit, with its tale of the first man and woman, is perhaps an appropriate occasion to reflect on the nature of sexuality and the whole gamut of relationship between the sexes, the nature of family life and the family in the strange century just ended. Suddenly, during the past fifty years or so, all the conventions that held society together around the family and man-woman relations seem to have spun apart. Perhaps no aspect of human life and experience has been more problematic for this age, which has so prided itself in its modernity and rationality.

A fruitful avenue for understanding the root of this problem is that sexuality is paradigmatic for the deepest antinomies within the human being. Sex is, on the one hand, a blind, instinctual act, driven by seemingly irresistible, overwhelming force, associated with the most intense pleasurable feelings, without any relation to the “human” qualities of ones partner; and, on the other hand, associated with our deepest, most tender, private feelings and needs, for intimacy, trust, tenderness, etc., and inextricably linked with the worlds of emotion, of affection, of feeling, of a unique choice (who hasn’t felt the absolute uniqueness of one's beloved?)—in brief, of all that makes us “human."

The dichotomous nature of our sexuality may be seen in the opening chapters of Genesis. Various contemporary modern Jewish religious thinkers have attempted to resolve the sharp contrast and apparent contradiction between the two parallel descriptions of the Creation of the universe and of man in Chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis. This group of contradictions, which also gave rise to the “Documentary” school of Bible criticism, is interpreted by some as intended to point up the dichotomies, paradoxes and antinomies of the universe and of humankind’s own experience and self. The two accounts, rather than contradicting one another, are thus seen as highlighting different aspects of the complex, multi-faceted mosaic of our existence. This approach has been highly developed for the entire Torah by Rabbi Mordecai Breuer. But perhaps none has done this more profoundly and interestingly for the Creation story, developing an entire Judaic philosophic anthropology, than the late lamented Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik in his monumental essay, “The Lonely Man of Faith.”

The Rav does not specifically address himself there to the issues of sexuality. Instead, he interprets the verses relating to the creation of man and woman in terms of human community, and the significance of fellowship and companionship in the context of the two ideal human types: “Majestic Man” and “Existential Man” or, more simply put, Adam the First and Adam the Second. If, however, we apply his method to the specific issues of sexuality we will discover an interesting contrast.

In Genesis 1 (v. 26ff.), male and female are created together. Their coupling is seen as entirely natural, as a given, simple fact without any element of deliberation or volition. (Perhaps it was this that prompted the Midrashic reading of this verse, parallel to or in wake of the Greek myth of the primordial androgynous human being, who was severed in two; see Gen. Rab. 8.1;b. Erubin 18a and par.). Man and woman seem to mate as easily and unreflectively as the flocks and kine of the field; albeit there is perhaps a hint of power and even violence in the Rabbinic reading of “and you shall subdue it/her” (ve-kivshuha in 1:28 being taken as referring, not only to man’s mastery and dominion over the earth, but to his subjugation of woman; b. Yevamot 65b).

Chapter 2, by contrast, shows woman being created as an answer to man’s loneliness. “It is not good that man be alone” (v. 18). There is a full cycle here of loneliness, seeking a partner, courtship, and finally union—followed by a statement of the way of the world, in which the young couple leave their parental homes and establish a new, independent social unit (al ken ya’azov ish…). It seems significant that the flow of this account is interrupted by two seemingly irrelevant verses (vv. 1920): God brings all the various animals before Adam to see what he will call them, Adam dutifully gives names to each animal, but the pair of verses ends with the melancholy observation, “and for Man there was not found a help­mate (‘ezer kenegdo). Why are these two verses interjected seemingly out of nowhere? Can it be to suggest the conscious rejection of mere animal sexuality? The various other creatures were brought before Man as potential mates, so to speak, but he rejected them all, not going beyond giving them each names. (Why did he give them names? Because names, language, is emblematic of meaning. We encounter man here as a creature of consciousness, evaluating and conveying significance upon the world surrounding him.) These two verses can also be seen, if you will, as symbolic of the gap, so keenly and universally felt in our society, between longing and fulfillment. We can imagine Adam dissatisfied, looking for something or someone that he did not even know how to articulate. Only when Adam encountered the Woman, who had been created specially for him, not only as an anonymous hole to be filled, to put matters rather coarsely, but as a human personality, meeting his need for companionship as well as for raw sex, could he say zot hapa’am ezem me-‘atzamai uvasar mibesari: “This time, this one, is someone who truly "complements me, like a familiar, long-lost friend—of my own bone and my own flesh.”

Some questions: What are we to understand by the putting of Adam to sleep, and the removal of his rib to make the woman. Perhaps sleep is suggestive of the unconscious realm, the world of dream and archetypes (Jung’s animus and anima?) and pre-rational connections. And perhaps the rib is suggestive of the presence of the self in the other: the simultaneous strangeness and sameness to self one discovers in a mate. And what does the legend of primordial androgynous humanity mean, in depth?

In brief, our sexuality relates to our being biological, animal-like creatures, driven by instinct—and at the same time creatures of consciousness. Indeed, these two aspects are inextricably linked, inasmuch as the sexual act is connected with the body of another human being, so that the object of our lust, no matter how transient or purely “animalistic,” is him/herself another human person with consciousness, feeling, an entire world of memory, thought, experience, etc.

This antinomy is, of course, one of the central paradoxes discussed in numerous places in our tradition: man as lowly, mortal creature, a child of the physical world—and at the same time endowed with consciousness , with spiritual longings, seeking meaning, etc. The two slips of paper which Rebbe Elimelekh of Lizhensk carried in his pockets: mah adam va-teda’ehu and vat’hasrehu me’at me-elohim (“What is man that You should know him?” and “You have made him but little lower than the angels” – both from Psalm 8); man as afar min ha-adama, “dust of the earth” and tselem elohim,“ in the image of God.” Or, to quote the final section of the Yom Kippur liturgy: We speak of man as being no more than the animal (u-motar mhaadam min habehema ayin) and in practically the next breath say ata hivdalta enosh me-rosh va-takerehu la’amod lefanekha: “You have separated man from the beginning and taught him to stand before You.” Religious consciousness, the ability to stand before God, is seen as the crowning glory of human experience.

Sin in the Garden

One of the cliches of modern liberal Jewish apologetics is that Judaism has a “healthy,” “positive” attitude toward sex, in contradistinction to Christianity. Exemplary of this is, of course, the Garden of Eden story. Christianity sees the sin of Adam and Eve as the Original Sin, and as more or less identified with the discovery of sexuality. They only mated after the “Fall”—after eating of the fruit. Until then, they did not know the sexual nature of their bodies. “The two of then were naked… and were not ashamed” (2:25) (see Milton’s Paradise Lost). Shame—and sexual desire—only came after eating of the fruit. Sexual intercourse is only referred to for the first time in Gen 4:1: “and Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and birthed a child, and she called his name Cain …,” suggesting that it only occurred after they left the Garden.

Judaism reads this story differently. The phrase in 4:1: veha-adam yada’ et havah eshto, is in fact in the past perfect: “And Adam had [already; possibly in the Garden] known Eve his wife.” This is in striking contrast with the usage elsewhere (4:17, 25; 1 Sam 1:9), vayeda … et ishto, where it is an imperfect verb.

We are left, then, with the image of a possibility of sex as innocent: the lost paradise is not a child-like, pre-puberty state, but a holy, innocent, joyful, uncomplicated sexuality. This motif may be seen, for example, in those Rabbinic interpretations which portray the cherubim in the Temple as a man and woman, who even served as a kind of weather vane for the state of relations between God and Israel: when in harmony, they were locked in embrace, while when estranged their backs were turned to one another. One Midrash even relates that when the Romans entered the Temple they and were scandalized to see the cherubim as two naked figures. (Albeit there are admittedly other streams in the Midrash that are deeply uncomfortable with this, and see the cherubs as pre-pubescent children).

Three further examples of a celebration of innocent, nay, holy sex in Judaism. One, the role of marital sex in the celebration of the Sabbath; in Kabbalah, in particular, sexual union one Friday night is seen as the very culmination, the apex of the mystical service of that evening. Two, the Sheva Berakhot, the seven blessings recited under the Huppah and at a wedding feast, hearken back to the Garden of Eden, as a time emblematic for the rejoicing of man and woman together and with one another. And third, of course, the simple, unselfconscious joyfulness of love as reflected in the pages of Song of Songs, in a literal, non-allegorical reading.

What then was the sin of eating the fruit, and why did it bear the dire consequences that it did? Many modern philosophers see it as the discovery of willfulness, of the possibility of not obeying God. Thus, Erich Frohm in You Shall be as Gods speaks of the knowledge of good and evil as equivalent to knowledge of one's own free will, of the ability to choose. As such, it is seen psychologically as a necessary stage in maturation, and the “expulsion” from the Garden is not so much a punishment as an inevitable consequence of this new knowledge.

Without rejecting this interesting reading, I would like to suggest an alternative reading. In a simple reading of the text, one senses a strong element of sexuality. “And the snake was more crafty/naked (‘arom) than all the other beasts that the Lord God had made.” Indeed, the Midrash sees him as being sexually aroused by the sight of Eve, his ruse being motivated by jealousy of Adam, in hopes of seducing Eve. More significantly, the immediate result of their eating the fruit was “And their eyes were opened, and they knew that they were naked … and they sewed fig leaves to cover themselves” (3:7), in striking contrast with their lack of shame at their nakedness noted in 2:25. If the knowledge of good and evil was connected with the making of choices and moral autonomy, why the sudden awareness of their nakedness?

It seems to me that the eating of the fruit (which is itself seductive, almost erotically sensuous, as described in v. 6) is somehow connected, not with sexuality in itself, but with the sense of sexuality as somehow shameful, embarrassing, evocative of guilt. It was no longer the simple, natural, joyous coupling that it was before. Why? What is it in the nature of sexuality that leads to these ambivalent feelings? I have no simple answers to these questions, albeit I have certain very tentative theories (in brief, that it arises from the almost unbearable, innate tension between the two poles described above; ve-day la-hakima), but we know that this complex of feelings exist in very many, if not all, human cultures—and certainly in the more complex, “advanced” ones.

One of the leit-motifs of post-Medieval, Enlightenment culture—i.e., that which was “free” of religion in general and Christianity in particular—has been the attempt to restore the sense of child-like innocence to sexuality. The list is a long one, and includes Jean Jacques Rousseau, with his romanticism of the “noble savage”; the Nudist movement, which began with the Germany Nacktkultur of the turn of the last century, which advocated a healthy attitude toward the body, a greater frankness between the sexes, and disowning shame or guilt; the Hippie communes of the ‘60’s, with their attempt to create new extended “families,” without sexual exclusiveness and without jealousy. William Blake gave poetic expression to these wishes and to his criticism of the creation of guilt by religion in some of his “Songs of Innocence and Experience,” such as “The Garden of Love” and “A Little Girl Lost.” (“…and priests in black gowns were walking their rounds, and binding with briars my joys & desires”). Aldous Huxley, in a curious little essay entitled “Appendix,” describes the attempt of a nineteenth-century community in the town of Oneida, New York, led by one John Humphrey Noyes, to “separate the biological from the human function of sex,” thereby presumably overcoming the ugly, animalistic effects of lust. This was accomplished by means of “complex marriage,” in which the sexual act served as a “sacrament and mode of mystical knowledge,” through the practice of coitus reservatus among all members of the community. Huxley goes on to mention the presence of such ideas already among Medieval Christian heretical groups, such as the Cathars, in twelfth-century France, or the Adamites, or Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit, in thirteenth-century Flanders. The restoration of innocence to sexuality, as the psychological sin qua-non of the lost Golden Age, is thus one of the leit-motifs of modern anti-clericalism.

Have any of these groups succeeded? The historical evidence is, to say the least, far from encouraging. (Interestingly, Sigmund Freud, who is often blamed for the obsession with sex of modern culture, never advocated such ideas. An unbiased reading of his Civilization and Its Discontents and his other broader philosophical works makes this point abundantly clear.)

To conclude, my reading of this chapter is similar to that of Christianity in seeing the Garden of Eden scene as related to sexuality, but differs in perceiving the Edenic state not as one of virginity, but of innocent eros. The logical consequence that follows lies in seeing the married state, rather than celibacy, as the ideal. But woe to he who tries to literally restore the lost Paradise of innocent erotism in the here and now. That way lies madness, societal and individual.

Adam and Eve: A New Midrash

Last year, I speculated about the nature of the sin of eating the fruit, and why their new-found “knowledge” led them to feelings of shame. Unlike Christianity, we do not see sexuality as inherently evil or as paradigmatic for wrongdoing, as in the doctrine of ”Original Sin.” Yet that there is such a connection is suggested by the fact that initially Adam and Eve were naked “but were not embarrassed” (2:25) while straight after eating the fruit “they knew they were naked” and sewed fig leaves and hid themselves from God (3:78). The following “new midrash” is an attempt to wrestle with this problem.

When Adam and Eve were first created, they were like two innocent, artless children—trusting, open, delighting in the sheer joy of life without a thought for the morrow. They found in one another delightful companions, sporting and playing together and—because they were, as we are told, created with fully-grown, adult, sexually developed bodies—they quickly discovered the delights of love-making, in purity and innocence, with a childlike love and friendship and joy in one another.

There was also a Serpent who lived in the Garden. We don’t know exactly who he was: some midrashim say he was the Satan, or the embodiment of the Evil Urge, while others say he was a real serpent, only unlike today’s snakes he walked upright. But one thing is for sure: he was far more innocent, but was filled with guile and wickedness, sheer meanness and cussedness; he was totally cynical, and no doubt took pride in his sophistication and wisdom in the ways of the world, thoroughly understanding what we today call human nature (which at the time only existed in potential) and its weaknesses. Moreover, he was glib and clever, and could easily talk circles around Adam and Eve, who were naive, childlike souls in adult bodies. One day, he saw the two of them sporting together. Some say he desired Eve; or perhaps he couldn’t stand other creatures delighting innocently in the sheer joy of being alive. In any event, he set out to get them into trouble, and offered Eve the fruit of the tree.

The “knowledge” contained in this fruit was not knowledge of sexuality—they had already discovered the pleasure to be derived from their bodies; nor was it the knowledge of moral autonomy and making choice (as Erich Fromm was to write millennia later). It was similar to the other fruits of the garden, which were pleasant to see and good to eat (2:9), but it had two more features: it added a dimension of desire, of intensity and lustfulness, to what the eyes saw; and it gave those who ate it the properties of knowledge and understanding (3:6). It awakened both memory and imagination. Adam and Eve no longer lived in the eternal, joyous presence of the Garden alone, but remembered what had happened in the past, and imagine possibilities in the future.

The next day, Eve went off by herself. Perhaps she was playing with one of the tame and friendly animals (even those who would later become fierce predators were gentle and approachable); or perhaps she was exploring the endless variety of trees and flowers and vegetation in the garden; or perhaps she was lying down in the grass to take a nap, soaking up the warm but gentle sun. In any event, Adam came across her, and this time his eyes saw her in different light. The sight of her naked breasts and thighs awakened the memory of what it had been like the last time they had lain together, and his imagination conjured up the desire to lie with her there and then. But she was absorbed in her own activities, and didn’t want to just then. Before, when they made love, there had not been taking and being taken, an initiator and one who responded, but things happened spontaneously, playfully, with mutual desire. This time it was different. Adam only knew that he desired her: his imagination, his newly awakened faculty of desiring-sight, propelled him on, without regard for her feelings or wishes, and he took her, by brute force. The first rape in human history had taken place.

Afterwards, she cried, and he comforted her. But gradually, over the course of days and weeks, things began to change between them, and they both realized that this thing which we call sex, and which they only knew as the simple delighting together of man and woman, was not so simple, and that there was a darker side to their delightful game. “And they knew that they were naked.” And not only in the sexual sense. The faculty of imagination, of desirous seeing and perception, ultimately changed everything. They began to find something shameful, not quite clean or innocent, in their nakedness, so they wove simple garments to cover themselves—perhaps from one another, perhaps from God, perhaps from both. Until that fateful day when God went walking in the Garden at the time of the evening breeze (He of course knew already knew what had gone on with them), and they hid themselves from God.

The text tells us of Divine curses and expulsion from the Garden. But perhaps this was no physical expulsion from the Garden. It could be, that once they discovered these bitter, unhappy truths about themselves, Eden simply ceased to be Eden, and became just another place. And the curses laid upon them by God—of the subordination of the woman to her man and her dependence upon him; the power relations between the sexes; the facts of lust and desire sometimes getting in the way of human love and companionship, rather than expressing intimacy—all these were not curses or punishments imposed upon them at one particular moment, but facts of their existence that they discovered, as a result of their newfound consciousness and awareness.

“And your longing shall be to your husband, and he shall dominate you”

After Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the garden, God imposed curses upon each of them, and upon the snake (3:14-19)—curses that are emblematic of the human condition. The woman was told: “I shall greatly increase your pain in pregnancy; you shall bear children with pain. And your desire shall be to your husband, and he shall dominate you.” The latter sentence seems to me a frank admission that, for countless generations, human society has been ruled by men; that women, to put it somewhat crudely, more often than not get the raw end of the stick.

There has been much discussion in recent years, in wake of the nascent Jewish religious feminist movement, of the morning blessing “shelo asani isha” (“who has not made me a woman”). The discussion usually goes back and forth, in a dialogue of the deaf, between those woman who say that this blessing is insulting because it implies that women are inferior; and the familiar line of Orthodox apologetics, that it really refers to mitzvot alone, and is an expression of men’s happiness that they have the opportunity to perform more mitzvot than women. Some people add that women are in fact more spiritual by nature, and thus do not require so many, constant reminders of their connection to God, etc., etc.

But perhaps another line of interpretation is possible. This blessing is not one looking down at women, but seeing their state with real empathy, as if the man is saying: “Women have a harder lot in life than do men; thank God I don’t have to put up with this.” A woman, by virtue of her being female, needs to cope with circumstances no man ever needs to confront: the shame and social sanctions connected with her sexuality are far greater than that of man. A woman can become a prostitute; a woman can be raped; a woman can become an old maid. (This line of interpretation may, in my opinion, be supported by the first opinion in Rashi on this subject, Menahot 43b, s.v. haynu isha. I hope to discuss on another occasion the halakhic issues involved in a community abolishing a statutory blessing that has become distasteful to them, and whether such a change is desirable.)

Adam’s Curse is focused on the realm of labor, and the unyielding nature of the soil: "The earth shall be cursed because of you, and you shall eat its fruits only by much effort … by the sweat of your brow … it shall yield thistles and thorns.” And concludes: “Until you return to the earth from which you were taken, for you are dust and to dust shall you return.” The man, perhaps because he is not stuck in a subservient sexual role, is more concerned with the intractable, stubborn nature of the physical world which he tries to conquer, and of his own eventual mortality.

Cain and Abel: The First Murder

The story of Cain and Abel is a familiar one. I picture Cain as a physically powerful but inarticulate, introverted, silent person, who mulled over real and imagined grievances for days and months, until one day, without warning, it burst forth in a sudden act of violence. But the account elicits as many questions as it does answers.

Why was the sacrifice of one brother accepted, and not that of the other (4:3-5)? Is this connected to the fact that one was a tiller of the soil and the other a shepherd? (An interesting answer is provided to this question in Daniel’s Ishmael, a contemporary ecological tract.) What is the meaning of the divine admonition in vv. 6-7, in which “sin” seems to be personified as a being with a will of its own? And what is the significance of the exact parallel between this verse and Eve’s curse in 2:16, in which sin “desires” Cain as a woman desires her man?

After the murder, and Cain’s notoriously evasive answer, he is “banished” from the face of the land. There seems to be a parallel here to the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden, as well as to the curse of the land (compare 3:17-19 with 4:11-12). How are we to understand this? As a further level of alienation from “the good life”?

What about Lemech’s boast to his wives in 4:23-24? Did he kill Cain, as the midrash suggests? It would seem that, for some women at least, male violence is a sexually arousing thing: the midrash says that this little speech was his way of getting his recalcitrant wives back into his bed. It is an unfortunate truth that women may at times be attracted by violence in a man; no doubt an atavistic throwback, connected with it showing his ability to provide for, defend and protect his woman, ward off rivals, etc.

Turning to the deeper significance of this whole story: the Torah seems to be telling us something about the archetypal, permanent nature of the human propensity to violence and to bloodshed. Anyone who has lived though the past month in the Middle East will be hard put to disagree, and is liable to be pessimistic about “the lion lying down with the lamb.” Violence certainly ranks as an ineluctable feature of human behavior, alongside whatever one reads as the sin in the story of the Garden. Violence surely brings about an internal exile from the Good Land as surely as does the former.

An interesting midrash (Genesis Rabbah 22:7) attempts to understand the nature of the “words” that Cain and Abel had with one another when they were in the field. One view says that they divided all the property in the world: one took all the land, and the other took all the moveable objects. The one who owned all the mobilia told the other: “Strip! Even the clothing you wear isn’t yours!” The other responded: “Fly! You’re not even allowed to stand on the ground!” A second view says they argued over the privilege of the Temple being built on their land. A third view says that they fought over a woman: either Eve (!), or a twin sister born with Abel.

Rav J. B. Soloveitchik taught this midrash as reflecting upon the three great causes of human strife: property, religion (or, more broadly, any ideology over which men dispute intensely), and sex. To which I would add: one may read twentieth-century history as, among other things, the attempt to eliminate these causes of war and violence, and the gradual sobering to the sad knowledge that it is all but impossible to do so. Socialism was an attempt to eliminate strife over property, by eliminating inequality. Some champions of atheism claimed that, if there were no religion, there would be no division or rancor between people based upon belief (see the Beatles’ song, “Imagine”). Advocates of free love hoped that it would be possible to educate people away from sexual jealousy and possessiveness; that a rational attitude to sex as a simple biological act would make “crimes of passion” a thing of the past. Unfortunately, all three have been shown to be vain hopes, as has pacifism, the attempt to abolish war as an instrument of national policy.

Notes

1. Tradition 7:2 (1965): 5-67; reprinted in book form.

2. For a good scholarly article summarizing the two positions, see Gary Anderson, “Celibacy or Consummation in the Garden? Reflections on Early Jewish and Christian Interpretations of the Garden of Eden,” Harvard Theological Review 82:2 (1989), 121-148.

3. I hope to demonstrate this, through an analysis of the Sheva Berakhot as centered on the creation and Edenic experience of man and woman, on another occasion.

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